“There’s always bureaucracy and red tape,” I said. “Anyhow, I told Dixie I’d stay with Lynnette. Speaking of whom, where is she?”
She pointed and I walked over to Pell’s back porch and looked up. There sat Lynnette about twenty feet off the ground, half hidden in the branches of a tall oak tree that had almost finished leafing out.
“Hi there,” I said.
She gave me a solemn nod, then looked away.
I was learning that her plaited pigtail was a barometer of her mood. At the moment, it hung limply over her left shoulder and she twisted the end aimlessly through her small fingers.
Drew touched my arm and we walked out of earshot. “She’s been up in that tree ever since I got here and I can’t get her to come down. She’s always been so sweet and precious to me and now I can’t even get her to talk. Poor little thing must be grieving her heart out.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s like cats. She’ll come down when she’s hungry or thirsty or needs the bathroom. You go ahead. I’ll watch her till Dixie comes.”
“There’s just one hitch,” said Drew, adjusting the cuffs of her black linen jacket. “I have my car out front, but there’s no time now to hunt for a parking space over there. I was going to get Dixie to drop me off.”
“I can do that,” I said. “I’ll put my stuff in my room and you write Dixie a note so she’ll know I’ve got Lynnette.”
When I got back, the child was still up in the oak.
While Drew stuck the note on Dixie’s screen door, I called up,
“Hey, Lynnette,
Want to get
In my Corvette?”
“That’s not a Corvette,” she said scornfully.
“Well, Lynnette doesn’t rhyme with Firebird”
She didn’t move. “I’m waiting for Aunt Millie and Shirley Jane.”
“I don’t think they’ll get here much before dark and Drew really needs us to drive her somewhere right now,” I told her. “Besides, I was hoping you’d show me through the Discovery Center this afternoon.”
“With the dolls?”
“Dolls?” It was my understanding that the Center was devoted to a history of furniture making. Where did dolls come in?
“They’ve got a bajillion. Wait’ll you see. Don’t budge, Miss Deborah Judge. I’m coming.”
“You must have children,” Drew said as she tucked herself into my passenger seat.
“Nope. Just lots of nieces and nephews.”
Lynnette dropped like a feather from the lowest limb and scrambled into the backseat. If her braid didn’t exactly float, neither did it droop.
“Click it or ticket,” she chanted as we buckled up and hit the road.
The resiliency of childhood.
Having grown up in the area, Drew Patterson knew every inch of High Point and she knew how to thread the one-way streets to get us over to the west side of town and eventually cross the railroad tracks without having to double back.
The String and Splinter, I was told, was in Market Square, a complex of interconnected buildings that looked like an old antiques mall grafted on a modern high rise.
“So what is it?” I asked as we waited through a second cycle of lights while trying to cross Main Street. “A restaurant?”
“Dining club. Most members are either in furniture or hosiery. They should have called it Fabric and Wood, but I guess that wouldn’t have been cute enough.”
“Are you a member?”
“Dad is. My grandfather was one of the original members.” She gave a small laugh. “Now that could be the furniture industry’s motto: I’m Following in My Grandfather’s Footsteps. It’s almost like medieval Europe. Your grandfather worked on the line, you work on the line. Your grandfather was sales rep for this territory, you work the same territory fifty years later. Your grandfather owned a furniture company and joined the String and Splinter, you do, too.”
“You serious?” I asked as the light finally stayed green long enough for me to get through the intersection. “You actually inherit a spot in a factory or a sales territory?”
“Absolutely. That’s why Jacob Collier was so furious with Ch—”
She broke off as she suddenly remembered that Lynnette was sitting quietly in the backseat.
“So now you go on around the hospital and just keep straight till we cross over the railroad tracks, then take the first left.”
I did as she said and fetched up in front of a charming black iron gate that led to the String and Splinter Club’s heavy oak door. The facade was brick and boxwood and frosted glass for privacy.
“Very British-looking from out here,” I observed.
“Inside’s full of Sheraton and Queen Anne reproductions. Queen Victoria would feel right at home.”
She might poke fun at it, but I could hear the affection in her voice.
“Dad and Mother love it and the chef is wonderful. Maybe you could join us for lunch one day next week?”
Spoken with the graciousness of a hereditary princess.
“I’ll have to look at my schedule,” I said.
Drew thanked me for the lift, told me how to get to the Discovery Center, and reached back to squeeze Lynnette’s knee. “ ’Bye, punkin. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
“Okay.”
11
« ^ » “The ancient Egyptians had in their houses, not only such articles of use as tables, chairs, and couches, but in the residences of the rich, these pieces of furniture were made of the rarest woods, with costly carvings, and inlaid work of gold and ivory.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
The Furniture Discovery Center is back of the Convention Bureau’s tourist information office and only a short walk from many showrooms, but most Market people must have been heeding the Museum Visitors Only sign in the parking area because I actually found a spot on the first try.
“Do you come here much?” I asked Lynnette as we crossed the graveled lot
“Uh-huh.” She headed directly for the correct door and her sand-colored braid swung jauntily across her narrow back.
I paid our admission fee to the attractive brown-haired woman at the desk and followed Lynnette, who knew exactly what she wanted to see and it wasn’t how tree logs get turned into Queen Anne armoires, which was the main focus of the museum.
“First come see the model bedrooms,” she said, leading me off to the left, past the gift shop and into a small room devoted to dioramas of fifteen famous bedrooms through the ages. The sleep furniture, as I was learning to call it, ranged from King Tut’s bull-shaped gold bed and Queen Elizabeth the First’s massive four-poster to the moon bed of Kublai Khan and Queen Liliuokalani’s ebony bed with its horsehair mattress, each reproduced in delicious detail on a one-inch to one-foot scale and commissioned, I was amused to discover, by the Serta Mattress Company.
From there, Lynnette took me up a short ramp, past some dollhouses, including a little house trailer furnished in Fifties decor, and into a display area that truly seemed to hold a bajillion dolls. The floor-to-ceiling shelves and cases were jammed with dolls of all sizes, all materials, all nationalities, all time periods, and all collected by one Angela Peterson.
Lynnette showed me her favorites; then, while she wandered from case to case discovering new faces, I went back to the entrance to read about the woman who had built the collection. The placard was chatty and informative and told me that Mrs. Peterson had joined the military after the early death of her husband and had been stationed in Korea during that war. Later she was in Turkey for several years and used it as a jumping-off place to travel and collect. By the time she settled down in High Point, she had visited forty-four different countries and had brought back dolls from every one of them—some sixteen hundred dolls in all.
I spent more time on the placard than I normally would because two equally chatty women with Market badges were standing in the gift shop a few feet away and my ears pricked up as soon as I heard one of them say, “—just surpr
ised nobody killed him before this.”
“Like Tracy Collier?”
“Yeah. The way he was sleeping with her, getting kickbacks from her father and jerking her grandfather around by the nose—”
“Poor old Jacob.” The younger woman’s voice held youthful pity.
“Humph,” said her friend. “ ‘Poor old Jacob’ is so past it he couldn’t sell ice cubes in Hell if it wasn’t part of the golden egg. I heard that the real reason Chan converted them to house accounts was because he was so ticked at Jacob’s heavy dating.”
Golden egg? Heavy dates?
They moved on over to the cutaway upholstered couch on the main floor of the museum and I drifted after them, pretending to read the explanatory cards about eight-way hand-tied cone coils, kiln-dried wood frames, and flow-matched custom upholstery as I strained my ears to hear more about Chan Nolan and the Collier family. The news of his death must be all over the Market and I wondered if the woman’s choice of words was accidental or if it were already known that someone really had killed him.
Unfortunately, I had come in on the tail end of their gossip about Chan. A third buyer joined them burbling about “Alexander Julian’s color seminar” and how Vanna White, there to promote a mattress line, had planted a lipsticked kiss on a fabric mogul’s polished bald dome at lunch today, which, for some reason, made the first two laugh so hard that they had to head for the exit before one of the docents could ask them to leave.
I walked back toward the doll exhibit wondering about the animosity between Chan Nolan and Jacob Collier. How sexually active could a seventy-eight-year-old man be? And who was Chan Nolan to object to the grandfather’s randiness if he himself was getting it on with the man’s granddaughter?
It was, as the King of Siam once said, a puzzlement.
“And none of your business,” the preacher reminded me.
By three o’clock, Lynnette and I had exhausted the dolls. It was too early to take her back to Dixie’s but she was clearly ready to move on.
“Is there a playground nearby?” I asked as we walked out into the warm spring sunlight. An hour on the monkey bars or swings would probably ensure an early bedtime.
But Lynnette was to the industry born and had her own idea of how to spend the rest of the afternoon, an idea spurred by three huge helium balloons in the shape of a ewe and two lambs that floated against the bright blue sky, mascots for a line of designer sheets and spreads.
“Could we go to Market Square?” She tugged me toward the street, her braid swinging from side to side. Like Dorothy yearning toward Oz, she was lured by the balloons and by the cluster of mismatched buildings built into the hillside beneath them. “Please?”
I hesitated for a moment, wondering if Lynnette would be recognized. Unlikely, I decided. Fitch and Patterson was quartered in the Global Home Furnishings Market, a full three or four blocks from Market Square, and while we might pass business acquaintances who had known Chan and heard about his death, how likely was it that they’d ever met his daughter? Almost none of them knew me, so who was going to notice my Munchkin companion or give her a second glance at a trade show like this?
Besides, by the time we walked over, wandered around for an hour or so and then walked back, Lynnette would be as tired as if we’d gone to a playground, right?
Okay, okay. So I wanted to go look around as much as she did. After all, furniture was why I’d come to High Point in the first place, so why not throw a rock at both birds and check out the latest fashions?
We stopped by the car to pick up my Jacki Sotelli badge and I stuck a legal pad in my shoulder bag so I could make notes in case I found a perfect table or couch or chair.
“Parking until five o’clock is for Museum Visitors Only,” the preacher said priggishfy.
“So?” argued the pragmatist. “You visited, didn’t you? I see at least two empty spots and it’s not as if there’s going to be a rush on the place before it closes, is there?”
Made sense to me.
According to Pell Austin and Dixie, who had talked about it the night before, the original Market Square building was an old chair factory that had been gutted down to its brick walls and turned into showroom space. A system of escalators and sky walks connected it to buildings on the west side of Main Street so that buyers could avoid April showers and October winds.
Through the years, the old factory seemed to have sprouted brick wings and annexes all down the hillside, and one tall building towered above the rest. The domed high rise looked like any modern office building in Raleigh or Durham, but Dixie had said that the top of the building was devoted to luxurious penthouse suites for the Market’s high rollers.
Just inside the doorway stood two lovely young women who looked like spring buttercups in huge cartwheel garden hats with yellow streamers, wide yellow hoopskirts and low-cut bodices. They were passing out green nylon tote bags imprinted with the name of a waterbed company. I didn’t quite get the link between waterbeds and sexy Southern belles, but people were grabbing for them.
After last night’s fiasco I was off tote bags, but Lynnette seized one, slid an arm through each handle and wore it like a backpack, “ ’Cause sometimes you can get a lot of neat stuff,” she told me.
Her braid bounced in and out of the tote and her snaggle-toothed smile was electric.
If the Global Home Furnishings Market—GHFM—was an upscale furniture mall, Market Square was a modern version of an Arabian Nights bazaar.
Here on the lowest level, it was hard to tell where one display ended and another began. Hand-tufted velvet cushions and gold tasseled pillows spilled like a silken fountain onto lacquered tables and boxes that edged up against stair runners and area rugs next to Tiffany lamps and porcelain jardinieres big enough for Lynnette to hide inside. Live angelfish swam in a five-foot-tall Plexiglas column that was topped by a traditional clock face with Roman numerals: the grandfather clock as aquarium?
I tried to picture Kidd’s reaction to finding something like that in my living room.
(“Not even if you replaced the tropical fish with bluegills and croppies,” the pragmatist said sardonically.)
There were designer picture frames of inlaid woods, whimsical kitchen stools stenciled with fruits and vegetables, coffee tables topped by real sewer grates that had been buffed to a steely sheen, decorative folding screens that reminded me of the Stanberrys’, wrought-iron coatracks and candelabras, handblown glass of an airy delicacy, twig birdhouses and pebbled fountains designed for indoor sunrooms.
Almost every display area had a brass or crystal bowl filled with peppermints, chocolate-covered peanuts or hard candies and Lynnette’s grubby little hands dipped into every bowl we passed.
“Daddy always lets me,” she said when I suggested she might have collected enough. She dropped some foil-wrapped chocolates into her tote bag. “He says it’s like Halloween. I can bring it home, I’m just not allowed to eat it all at once. Besides, Shirley Jane’s coming and I can share.”
Remembering why Shirley Jane was coming, I didn’t have the heart to stop her, especially since she was still referring to Chan in the present tense.
A display of bed linens at the end of a long gallery had drawn a small crowd and as we drew nearer, we saw the attraction. The company’s logo was a sheep and two lambs jumping over a fence, just like the balloons tethered outside. Here in a straw-filled pen were the balloons come to life—a mother sheep and two woolly lambs.
A company rep was stationed there with an instant camera and enchanted customers lined up to have their pictures taken with the mascots. When it was her turn, Lynnette dropped down into the hay, put an arm around each lamb and smiled for the camera. She sat on a nearby hay bale to watch it finish developing, then gave it to me for safekeeping in my purse since she was afraid it would get candy smears if she put it in her tote.
“Well, hello,” said a friendly voice.
I turned around and saw Heather McKenzie smiling at me.
�
��I see you got your purse back. Did you find Savannah?”
“No. Sorry. The police found it—”
I broke off, not wanting to say where. Not with Lynnette only a few feet away.
Oblivious to the child, Heather stared at me wide-eyed. “I just realized. You were the one who found him, weren’t you?”
I tried to shush her, but her eyes widened even further as she gazed at something in the distance behind me.
“Look!” said Heather. “On the escalator. Isn’t that Savannah?”
Lynnette followed Heather’s pointing finger and stood atop the hay bale so that she could see over our heads.
“It is Savannah-Nana!” she squealed, and before I could stop her, she jumped off the bale of hay and squirmed through the line of people waiting to have their pictures taken.
“Lynnette! Wait!” I called, but she was gone, swallowed up by the crowds.
12
« ^ » “The couches upon which the old Romans reposed at table were often inlaid with silver, gold, ivory, tortoise-shell, and precious woods, with carved ivory or metal feet; and the furniture of a rich man’s house represented in itself an enormous fortune.”The Great Industries of the United States, 1872
I charged after Lynnette with Heather McKenzie close behind me, but the child was half my size and able to dart through openings in the crowd that got me a glare or an icy “Do you mind?” when I tried to slip through the same spaces.
By the time we finally elbowed our way over to the escalator in the middle of the floor, there was no sign of the child nor of Savannah in the solid flow of people jammed onto the moving stairs. Nevertheless, we stepped on and I shoved Heather in front of me since she was several inches shorter.
“You keep looking up there for Savannah,” I ordered. “I’ll check out the floor.”
We rose steadily while I anxiously scanned the area for a small pink T-shirt and a long bouncy pigtail. If there were any children at all on the first floor, I didn’t see them. A flash of rainbow pastels entering Arte de Mexico raised my hopes till I saw it wasn’t Savannah.
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